Lui did not sleep that night.
The room was very small, so small, in fact, that it could only fit one bed, and when two people lay on that bed, it was tricky to even flip over.
In her current living situation, Lui knew that she could not look forward to a comfortable bathing experience, but what she did not expect was that the conditions were so deplorable that she’d run out of hot water halfway through the process.
“…”
By the time the water gradually ran cold, she could not remember how many times she had been exasperated since arriving at this place.
She hadn’t even run the water for ten minutes!
Fortunately, the military academy always demanded efficiency, and with her short hair, she cleaned up much faster than other people.
Within the next three minutes, Lui rinsed off the soap foam covering her body, wiped herself down with a towel, and donned a coarse, form-fitting white shirt. The lower hem skimmed the top of her thighs, revealing the smooth, taut contour of her legs.
Lui was a little conflicted about wearing pants.
She was no stranger to sleeping in whatever was on hand out fighting in the field, but if she had the option, she would try to preserve her sleep quality as best as she could.
Even though she did not sleep very long, Lui naturally expended great effort in extending her sleep time and improving her sleep quality—after all, a person’s strength had its limits, and poor sleep could make her lose her edge in dangerous situations.
But as soon as she thought of Angel, who was outside, she felt a headache come on.
If she had to sleep with Angel, then whatever. With the level of Angel’s mental flare ups, she really didn’t want to waste time keeping her guard up.
Lui turned it over in her mind several times, then figured that, worst come to worst, she’d just tie Angel to the head of the bed with her bandages—since she wouldn’t be able to fight, then there would be no problem.
And so, when Lui walked out of the washroom, what entered Angel’s sight was a pair of long, straight legs.
Angel even looked Lui up and down before her gaze came to rest on her legs. She whistled flippantly, her lips curling into a now-familiar seductive smile, “Nice body.”
Lui: “…”
She wordlessly crammed herself onto the bed, ignoring Angel’s deliberately affected expression. She controlled her volume, saying sedately, “Go to sleep.”
Angel’s ill-fitting ‘prison clothes’ had already been pulled back on.
The bandages Lui had rolled up previously were once again spilled out onto the floor all the way from the bed to the door, like some sort of artistically draped snakeskin.
She really did not know how Angel had been so destructive only by changing her bandages.
Angel, who had just stopped bleeding a moment ago, clamored over, grinning. She reached out to wind her hands around the back of Lui’s head, her speed nearly beyond Lui’s perception.
Lui subconsciously pulled her head back, pushing Angel’s troublesome hands away.
Her gaze landed on the filthy light on the ceiling, and in an instant, her eyes felt like they were burnt.
The light suddenly darkened; Angel had taken the chance to pounce on her, lowering her eyes to look into Lui’s eyes.
Angel’s form was backlit, a silhouette of luminescence to caliginousness, distinctiveness to blurriness imprinted onto Lui’s retinas.
Lui lifted her head and gazed up at Angel as a sacrificial lamb gazes upon the theophany of God.
This was wrong.
Her mind wandered for a moment before she was pulled back from her train of thought. She did not hesitate to toss Angel away with her free arm, saying with a slight frown, “Go to sleep.”
Her movements were too excessive. People produced by the military academy had no idea what counted as ‘little’.
Angel was thrown onto the white wall with a heavy impact. She suddenly coughed. The blood that had just congealed flowed freely again, a stream of blood dribbling from her lips.
Perhaps she couldn’t endure the repeated blows. Angel silently rested against the head of the bed for a while before she finally regained some vitality.
She wiped away the blood at the corner of her mouth and rasped, staring at Lui, “As you command…Lieutenant General.”
When Angel said ‘Lieutenant General’, she raised the pitch of the final syllable with a complex emphasis, practically spine-tingling!
If it had been someone else, then they might not have been able to hold themselves back. But Lui’s eyelid merely twitched, her lips pressing together before she said in a low voice, “Don’t call me that.”
“Sleep.”
With a ‘pop’, the room’s sole light source shut off. The room did not have any crevices for light to seep through, so the room instantly turned pitch-black!
Their other senses strengthened with the lack of visual ability.
The sound of shifting fabric and steady breathing, the warm breath brushing their cheeks, the scent of blood and soap mixing together…
“An Ran, this is my final warning.”
Lui’s ears picked up the sound of fabric rubbing against the bed sheets. As Angel’s breathing grew closer, Lui instinctively raised her guard against any death-seeking behavior from Angel. She could not help but give a warning.
She just wanted to get some sleep!
“If you don’t want to be tied to the bed, then—”
Before she finished speaking, Lui sensed Angel quietly holding her fingers.
The back of her hand was covered by a pair of warm palms.
“Shhh—” Lui could almost see Angel press a finger against her lips.
“It hurts so bad…Lui…” Angel’s voice had turned devilish again as she said beseechingly, “Can I hold you? I usually sleep holding onto my toys or I can’t sleep.”
The implication being that if she couldn’t sleep, nobody could sleep.
Lui’s spine went rigid and she went silent for a long while, but in the end, she did not move.
Angel pressed her luck.
Lui felt Angel move her fingers one after the other, her slick fingernails followed by her smooth fingertips. As their fingers laced together, she shuddered like an electrical current flowed through her. Her nerve endings–even her spine—tingled with each movement of her fingers.
Her temperature rose, her heartbeat increased, her breath quickened. Adrenaline rushed through her body and the blood boiled in her veins.
Angel’s arm had encircled Lui’s waist at some point and her fingers haphazardly traced circles on her back and on the palm of one hand.
The taut skin quivered.
Lui’s entire body tensed, the throbbing at her temples making her feel ill at ease.
She held practically the same posture as Angel—she kept Angel’s spine within her grip in case of unexpected movements.
Lui quietly counted the other’s heartbeat in order to detect any divergence at its first appearance.
In contrast to Lui’s cautiousness, Angel seemed to only treat Lui as a big pillow.
Angel fiddled about until she finally found the most comfortable position in Lui’s arms. Her breaths quickly evened out.
One. Two. Three.
Both of their heartbeats slowed into a sleep cadence.
With her hand almost gripping Angel’s neck, she could end her life at any point.
She closed her eyes, then opened them again, gazing at the darkness in front of her blankly. Her mind was weighed down by vexations. She was doomed to spend the night sleepless.
The darkness was dreadfully still; even time seemed to blur.
Deep into the night a while later—about three to four hours, by Lui’s reckoning—Lui suddenly heard Angel murmur in her sleep, her voice as light as a kitten, “Lui, are you asleep?”
Lui did not answer.
Ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump.
Her heartbeat and breathing were, as always, normal.
If Lui did not have as much confidence in her judgment as she did, she would have thought that she had hallucinated.
Angel seemed to sink into a dream after this bit of sleep talk. She let out a few more rounds of meaningless babble, usually questions that went unanswered. By the sound of it, she was having a nice dream.
No one slept well that night.
Angel suddenly recalled a scene from a long, long time ago.
She was sleeping in Phinney’s[1]菲尼, Feini, putting this as Phinney for now, but could also be Fini, Fine, Finley, etc. arms just like she was now. She was about six or seven years old, the age at which she was too naughty to sleep.
At that time, Phinney would take a poetry book from some unknown planet or era from the shelf and gently read it aloud as a bedtime story.
And among those, Phinney’s favorite was a work by the poet Adunis[2]Ali Ahmad Said Esber, an Arab poet, translator, editor, and theorist of the twentieth and twenty-first century with the pen name Adunis of ancient Earth.
“Why do you want to read this poem?”
The young Angel could not refrain from asking.
And the other would always smile warmly and boop her dotingly on the nose, “Don’t you think this poem is like your current situation?”
The dam burst in her head, the memories flooding in. The seal on her mouth broke, and memories gathered into mumbles, broken syllables, and faltering dialogue.
“Man is two men…”
The voice cut off there.
Lui was shaken—the nerves stimulating her heart almost stopped.
That poem…she’d read it before.
When she was on Earth, the orphanage had received all sorts of ‘kind donations’, such as antiques from people’s homes that they no longer wanted—this naturally included coffee table paperbacks that had no value as collectibles.
Back then, Lui did not like mingling with the crowd and was always on her own. She had leafed through those disorderly items—and so, she retained an assortment of knowledge.
Lui recalled that she had been leaning against the corner of the table as she read the poem. The evening’s dim light flowed through the dilapidated window like water, gently illuminating the printed words.
“Man is two men.”
“One is awake in darkness, the other is asleep in light.”
“I am the flame and I am the dry brush.”
“And one part of myself consumes the other part.”
The author has something to say:
(Thanking the readers)
The translator has something to say:
The author talks about Adonis/Adunis, but the poem is actually by Kahlil Gibran, I believe? Could I be mistaken? I referenced the poem here.